The workflow in Allegro is somewhat different. Basically projects are treated at the schematic level as the schematic drives the design. In the PCB editor you dont have to keep adding paths for things like footprints though you would want to do this during setup. The allegro pcb editor settings are contained in a .env file. This file contains the paths to your symbols aka "Footprints" and padstacks etc. If you are new to allegro it can take some time to get your head around certain concepts. In the allegro PCB editor there are no libraries in the form of an integrated library. That is multiple footprints contained in one database file. Each footprint is basically a flat file. In the schematic editor "Orcad" you assign footprint names to each schematic symbol you use. When your schematic netlist is created the schematic gets packaged into a .brd file which is the Allegro PCB board file. The process can be a bit complex. The main thing to remember is that your footprints "Symbols as they are called in Allegro" have to be in a path that the pcb editor knows about otherwise your design wont package from the schematic. Typically designers using allegro create folders and put their footprints in there to form a library of parts. For example on your drive you might have three folders called resistors, capacitors. IC that contain footprints. In allegro pcb editor you configure the paths to point to those folders. You only have to do it once. There are a bunch of things you can do to speed things up. At the schematic level you could have common resistors such as 1206, 0805 etc with the pcb footprint name embedded in them. That way you would not have to manually assign footprint names to symbols. You could have a standard board file without any components but configured with color settings, Layers etc. When you create a new design you just use this standard board file as your template board. When your board is complete you could save that to a folder and also export all of the footprints your board used to that folder too. There is no real need to have a specific library on a per project basis because the physical library components can be easily exported from the board file. Hope this makes sense.. Paul.![]()
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